Powerline: The scientific debate over Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming continues to rage. In my opinion, the realists are thrashing the hysterics, but for a more neutral view, check out this essay by Rupert Darwall, the author of The Age of Global Warming: A History (2013)and Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex(2017).
Darwall’s essay is balanced and thorough. You really should read the whole thing. This is his assessment of one of the Left’s latest efforts to stoke hysteria, the West Antarctic melting due to geothermal heat. Which can hardly be caused by global warming, given the continent’s frosty temperatures:
The average high temperature in Antarctica in January is -18 degrees F, while the average low temperature in January is similar, at about -21 degrees F. The temperature decreases dramatically into February and then March. February’s average high temperature is about -41 degrees F and the average low is about -45 degrees F. The average high in March is -65 degrees F and the average low is about -70 degrees F.
Darwall explains what is going on:
West Antarctica has become the poster child of the media’s climate change alarmism. Late in 2016, four New York Times journalists visited the West Antarctic ice sheet, which had been singled out by Al Gore as having passed a climate change tipping point. “Recent computer forecasts suggest that if greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high level, parts of Antarctica could break up rapidly,” they wrote in a three-part story on their trip published in May. “Antarctica’s collapse has the potential to inundate coastal cities across the globe.” Scientists, they claim, now believe that West Antarctica is a disaster waiting to happen, if human-caused global warming has not already set the calamity in motion. “It’s kind of a blowtorch on the underside of the ice shelf,” one of the experts told them.
***
This speculation depends on greenhouse gas emissions causing the ice sheet to disintegrate. However, the human causation story is not straightforward, as the Times report quietly concedes. The warmer water under the ice shelf has not been linked to global warming—“at least not directly.” It had likely been there for centuries, so why had it not cooled down by now? …Despite the presence of a figurative blowtorch under the West Antarctic ice sheet, the word “geothermal” appears nowhere in the Times piece. The area sits atop the West Antarctic Rift System, where, according to a 2014 paper by four University of Texas geophysicists, “geothermal fluxes are expected to be high, heterogeneous, possibly transient.” Heat from the Earth’s interior, they note, is “likely a significant factor in local, regional, and continental ice sheet stability.” Did the Times fly four of its journalists to Antarctica to report on geothermal fluxes? The word does not appear in their three-part report. read more
” … forcasts suggest that if …
I can’t even get a correct forecast to suggest what this weeks weather will be like, ffs!
never take ‘suggestions’ for facts … a little tip from your Uncle Molon 🙂
Just as it is with their gun control arguments, they distort information or openly lie about it. They have lost all credibility and yet they continue to poison the minds of those too lazy to actually look into the issues.
Any Imbecile Knows that the core of the earth it practically ice cubes. Probably not any warmer than 6000°F.
whenever a volcano explodes, sheets of ice are thrown everywhere! [sarcasm]
They base their information on computer models only’ It’s garbage in garbage out.
I steal a quote from the brilliant David Burge of iowahawkblog:
1. Physics is science.
2. Physics is filled with undecipherable jargon.
Therefore…
All undecipherable jargon is science.
When fanatical people are on a tunnel vision Quest, they can’t be bothered with using intellect that could prove them Wrong !
What’s truly hysterical is that it clearly makes more sense to say that increased volcanic activity is causing more glacier melt. To say that the glaciers hold in the volcanoes is positively idiotic. The weight of even the largest glaciers likely pales in comparison to the power and heat of up-flowing magma, especially if it has contact with the bottom of the glacier.
What the angry guy said. ^
Another quick story from the road.
In the fall of 2016 I rode my motorcycle from Ft. Lauderdale to Front Royal Va. and back. The actual route is as follows.
FT Laud – Lake City FL – Highlands NC – Blue Ridge parkway – Mt. Mitchell (where I spread my stepfathers ashes) – Rockfish gap (the end of the BRP) – Front Royal (the end of Skyline Drive) – Norfolk Va. – Ocracoke Island The Outer Banks – Sumter SC – Lake City FL – Ft Laud.
It took 3 weeks. Was a little less than 3,000 miles when it was all said and done. NWS predicted rain (50%+) in my AO everyday I was on the road. It NEVER rained at all the whole trip.
Long story, but. The point is the forecasters don’t have a clue locally and if they’re that bad on a small scale imagine how wrong they can be on a long scale.
Yes we have to take care of the planet – but you doesn’t have to wash/wax/buff it out every other day.
I was taught once a month/6 weeks and rain will still bead up and run-off.
Thanks for the humour, extirpates.
It’s a good essay. If you prefer HTML to PDF reading, WUWT has it here.
It’s not really about Climate Change:
“”One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.
So what is the goal of environmental policy?
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.” https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/another-climate-alarmist-admits-real-motive-behind-warming-scare/
Millennials are concerned about “climate shift” theory. Remove the f and the truth in the lie is revealed. It’s a foundational theory for climate change, but basically, just another term for the same fake science crap.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-shift-synchronized-chaos.htm .